UH Manoa memorial service planned for award-winning computer sciences professor

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
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Posted: May 14, 2009


A memorial service for W. Wesley Peterson, an internationally renowned professor in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa‘s Department of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), will take place from 4:30-6:30 p.m. on Friday, May 22. It will be held at the East-West Center‘s Hawaiʻi Imin International Conference Center at Jefferson Hall, in the Garden Level rooms, on the UH Mānoa campus.

Professor Peterson passed away on May 6 after a brief illness.

The Michigan native was drawn to Hawaiʻi‘s gentle climate and Asian-influenced culture in 1964, when he joined the UH Mānoa faculty. In just his third year of employment, Professor Peterson was awarded a Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. During his tenure at UH Mānoa, Peterson also served as chair of the ICS department and was a former director of the statistical and computing center.

His numerous accolades include the Claude E. Shannon Award in 1981, and Centennial Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Information Society in 1984.

Best known for inventing the Cyclic Redundancy Check, for which he was named Japan Prize Laureate in 1999, Peterson also researched and published in the areas of error correcting codes, signal detection theory, programming languages, systems programming, networks and cryptography.

He obtained his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the UH Mānoa faculty, Peterson taught at the University of Florida and was a visiting associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information on Peterson‘s memorial service, contact Martha Crosby at 956-3500 or crosby@hawaii.edu